The City of Peoria is looking at cutting the budget Tuesday night. This isn’t part of the 2011 budget negotiations, but rather a cut to the 2010 budget. City staff is forecasting that there will be a $1.2 million shortfall in state income tax and personal property replacement tax revenues. Here are the areas to be cut:
Radios: $ 40,450
Public Safety Cameras: $200,000
Furniture and Equipment: $ 69,200
Renaissance Park: $ 43,890
Neighborhood Signs: $ 9,650
Trails Edge Hammerhead: $ 63,700
Traffic Signals: $ 1,910
GIS: $ 7,700
Fire Station Upgrades: $237,600
Fire Equipment-SCBA & Harness: $ 70,000
Fire Fleet Recap: $ 71,340
Fiber Optic: $ 60,000
Fleet Recap: $ 274,560
Western Avenue Greenway: $ 50,000
Nevertheless, the City is able to afford to give away $10 million in land to the County for $1 and to give $37 million to a millionaire hotel developer.
As is evident, when public spending increases, it creates inflation, which increases people’s living costs, which is also directly related to the mortality rate of adult men.
To that extent, it is advisable to have life insurance that provides your family with the guarantee of not being helpless. Visit https://www.lifecoverquotes.org.uk so you can see that the costs are affordable. A cheap payment for a peace of mind in your family.
wow… PFD takes the biggest hit.
Wow who on he FD pissed off the city they are taking some hard cuts. The only cuts I see that make sense are the park/trail and greenway and the furniture the rest are going to come back and bite them.
Yes, but I read elsewhere that these fire station upgrades can wait another year or so. The cut does not affect positions. Good to see police officers not listed, but equipment is. But what is a ‘Fleet Recap’, which is $274,000?
CJ, I respect your writings and your blog very much, but IMO your wording is misleading. You make it sound like the city has $50M in cash to hand over to the PRM and the hotel, which isn’t the case. (I’m not going to go on about the PRM land, I’ve seen enough debate about that to last me a decade)
But the $37M for the hotel is going to be given in bonds, not cash. Of course, I know those bonds have to be repaid, which is a concern to taxpayers if the hotel doesn’t make the revenues projected. But we won’t know that for about 5 years or so after it opens…and maybe by then the economy will be a lot better than it is now, and the city will have more $$$ flowing into its general coffers.
Keep in mind I do hope both the museum and the hotel become successful ventures…I am just as wary as others about how they’re being done.
Dennis,
That is the same argument the Peoria City Council makes.
Let me ask you this…if I can’t pay all my bills and have to cut back on things for my house (or make my house payment) how smart is it for me to put a highly speculative investment on my credit card?
Did we get 10,000 signatures to block the bonds? After all the news and press you guys got a month ago over this issue just wondering what became of the petition drive.
Point taken, anon e. mouse. But everyone has to take a risk at some point, & hope that if pays off. Studies have been done on this hotel project, but I know folks here don’t believe in studies anymore.
I’m speculating but the ‘recap’ references are likely for tire recapping of the vehicles. I can imagine that to buy new tires for a fire truck is insanely expensive, so as semi’s do they retread the tires.(recap) The downside is recaps do eventually fail, but thats why all those trucks have two tires on the back axles. (We all see the blown rubber on the sides of the highways) Whether forestalling the recap is that much of a sacrafice who can tell from the outside – it might have been a nice to do maintenance wise budget item. Certainly though those vehicles will eventually need new rubber of some sort.
The public snooping (I mean “safety”) cameras needed to be cut, as did some of this other stuff. They have wasted more than 50M, but I bet I could find more cuts. Do we really need to spend nearly 10 grand on “neighborhood signs”?
Fleet Recap stands for Fleet Recapitalization — it’s a line in the Capital Budget that is basically designed to ensure that the City’s fleet (there is a separate fund for Fire Vehicles from other City vehicles) is replaced on a reasonable schedule to control maintenance and upkeep costs and keep vehicles in a relatively current status). They use a similar approach to replacing PCs and other major technology / equipment (such as SCBAs, etc.). It is a systematic schedule for updating and replacing expensive equipment.
Dennis sez: “Point taken, anon e. mouse. But everyone has to take a risk at some point, & hope that if pays off”
I sez: I understand that, but what is the track record on the investments this organization has made in the past?
BTW – the status of the petition to “Block the Bonds” will be known this evening.
Also, lets not remember that the taxing bodies do (within statutatory limits) control the amount of money that goes into specific funds (general fund, etc.). And nothing stopped the county from issuing the same sales tax to support legitimate public infrastructure. Nothing is keeping the city from using HRA taxes for schools, or sidewalks.
But it remains true that when taxpayers are taxed for things like supporting civic centers and to help developers pay less for strip malls and baseball parks, they are far less likely to support taxes for schools, roads, sidewalks and police and fire.
So to say that “the money can’t be used for essential services” is wrong. It’s ALL taxpayer money. All of it. Every dime.
Dennis,
Its not that “folks here don’t believe in studies anymore.” My biggest problem[s] with Peoria’s ‘studies’ is; the high cost involved, despite what the studies reveal in the way of hard data, Peoria always seems to do the opposite, or they never act on the information at all.
None of the hotel studies proved conclusive in any way.
The studies done on the museum…do we need to go into that again?
Consulting firms like White Oaks, make thousands, if not millions, and their findings always seem to fall in line with what those who hire them want to hear…
Good luck on the council petition drive C.J…..I’ll sign it.
C.J., I hope our good friends at Book Nook have a copy of your petition for city council so I can sign it.
Paul
Where’d you guys get the idea CJ was running for City Council?
said so in the JS Word column today.
if you would have been at the last blogger bash you would have known.
Oh, heck – I just figured someone got their petitions confused.
I am extremely glad CJ is running. I like to see people who want to “do” instead of just talk.
I can’t sign anyone’s petition for Council, School Board, etc. in Peoria County…I live in Tazewell County.
Awesome news! So CJ is running and most of us had to find out through the Journal Star. And where were you on this bit of news, Billy? Couldn’t slip this in between Tea Party rants? 🙂
I agree–glad to hear that C.J. is running.
I was at the last blogger bash and never heard CJ was running
He was passing his petition around ,maybe to many beers?
1600 signed the Block the Bonds petition as reported on WMBD TV tonight. Interesting no one is discussing this topic.
Merle has some comments on his blog about block the bonds.
Here is the first paragraph of his article.
“Petition Efforts by Harding and Sandberg
Leaders of this “drive”, Brad Harding and Gary Sandberg, reported 1500+ petition signatures in total. My supporters, 15 in all and myself collected 1080 of these signatures leaving all other involved in this campaign securing a grand total of 500 signatures.
Wow, some effort, Gary and Brad”
http://www.centralillinoisnewscenter.com/news/local/Block-the-Bonds-Group-to-Turn-in-Petitions-103865399.html
So if the other BTB leaders would have done as “good” as Merle there would have been 5k signatures. If I was Merle I wouldn’t be so quick to throw others under the bus.
Whether we got the required number of signatures on the block the bond petition at least the county board knows that there are people out there that care and are watching closely what they are doing. We are going to be watching every T and every I that they use and what they are using them for from now on. LIfe as they have known it is going to be no longer. We are fed up with their bait and switch tactics on everything they do. Both the city and the county think they can just do anything they please with our money and our community and we are not going to let them get away with it any longer. We are going to be looking over their shoulder every step of the way. We are sick to death of all the scheming and lying and twisting of the fact to suit their wants and ways. Our little petition may not be a huge success but it is the first drop in the bucket of big things to come in the future. They better be minding their p’s and q’s from now on. We are not going to take their fakes any more.
SD,
I am glad you have such a rosy outlook on life. Let me clue you in on the thinking process, it’s the same one used by thugs in our community. Any intervention only has an effect while in real time it is actually happening. Meaning, the petitions did not have enough signatures therefore they won, you lost and they could care less that some of their constituents disagreed. The majority don’t care therefore there is no accountability….
The evidence in this little insight is in this PJS posting.
http://www.pjstar.com/news/x399785699/Museum-on-agenda-of-Forest-Hills-groups
The title of the presention is only the beginning of the FU to the taxpayers.
Sorry, put this in the wrong thread.
The next Fu to the taxpayers is in this article “County Administrator Patrick Urich has said the bonds will be backed by public facility sales tax revenues, which will no longer go toward annually paying off the county jail and juvenile detention center in 2013. He has also said there is more than enough of that revenue to potentially cover any shortfalls in the project.
Shortfalls, though, are something Urich has an eye on with the county’s overall budget in the coming year.”
Remember that the county board would not be allocating (OUR) money to the project over $40 million, which changed to $41 million and now folks, is a blank check.